


Psychic Ink

by HalfBakedPoet



Series: One Shot, Two Shot, Some Shots, Blue Box [9]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Magical Tattoos, One Shot, Romantic Fluff, Sad Ending, Tattoos, Tumblr Prompt, buckle up for hurtsville beep beep, coronapocalypse posting, do you ever just YEARN, thasmin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:22:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23336842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfBakedPoet/pseuds/HalfBakedPoet
Summary: The Doctor gets a tattoo.Prompted by tumblr user aktlovesstars: "Thirteen + tattoos"A series of vignettes over time.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Series: One Shot, Two Shot, Some Shots, Blue Box [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1668127
Comments: 33
Kudos: 66





	Psychic Ink

“Are you sure you want to do this?” asked Yaz hesitantly, watching the Doctor roll up her sleeves and scurry to set the TARDIS console.

“Course I do, always been something I’ve wanted to do, get a tattoo. Summat to feel more permanent when you’re always changing faces and bodies.” said the Doctor. It was the truth: she loved seeing living art in human skin. The idea had just struck her again, and this time she was going to act on it before the impulse whisked itself away and she’d remember to regret missing the chance four years later.

“But will it stick with you through that? Regeneration?”

The Doctor paused, mulling over Yaz’s question as though she hadn’t thought of it before, which, now that she considered it, she hadn’t. “I dunno! But won’t it be satisfying to find out?” In truth, if she _really_ thought about it, regeneration energy might—would, probably—burn the ink clean off and she’d have to get a touch up in the next life. If that were the case, however, she hoped to keep this body longer to enjoy it.

“What’ll it be, then? And how can you be sure you’ll still like it after a hundred years or so?”

“That’s the trick, Yaz,” beamed the Doctor. “Psychic ink! Changes perception filter based on your mood and whoever’s keen enough to spot it. Would you like one yourself?”

“My mum would kill me,” said Yaz, grimacing, “But forget my mum, _Sonya_ would kill me for not getting one with her.”

“They probably wouldn’t see it if they didn’t notice, but another time, then,” said the Doctor, pulling the lever.

“How much d’you want?” asked the artist, Serafin, after they walked in and the Doctor—altogether too bouncy for an ordinary tattoo appointment—had been seated in a squashy chair behind the counter. The parlor was located, the Doctor had described, in “the back end of Cassiopeia. Around there somewhere.” Yaz hovered nearby, the Doctor’s coat draped over her arm. It wasn’t a seedy parlor like some she’d seen around Earth; there was a no-nonsense structure to the well-lit place, which was paneled with black stained wood. Artists on Earth would have been wild to get their hands on some of the designs hung on the walls: alien species in every style imaginable—and those Yaz hadn’t—moving and stationary in hard lines, soft watercolors, iridescent and matte.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” admitted the Doctor, fidgeting. “Nothing too big, I suppose. First time.” The parlor smelled sterile; almost like a hospital the way the conditioned air was thick with evaporated cleaning fluids. “Is this the kind of ink that moves around the body, too?”

“Thassa premium. Hard to find in any galaxy, difficult to manufacture, period.” Serafin pulled a drawer open from the cart in the corner of the booth. “Lucky for you, I have a spot of it left.” She held up a bottle and Yaz saw what looked like thick, clear water slosh inside.

The Doctor beamed and gave it a scan with her ever-present sonic. “Looks like the real deal,” she said. “Let’s give it a go.”

“Any scales, hide, or otherwise thicker-than-average skin I ougta know ‘bout ‘fore we get started?”

The appointment was short, shorter than any tattoo appointments on Earth, thought Yaz as they stepped out of the parlor into bright sunlight. If she thought about it, it was more of an ink injection than an artistic acquirement. Still, the Doctor did her best to hide her discomfort as the needle buzzed for all of fifteen minutes, drawing a raw, pink circle on her wrist.

Back on the TARDIS, in the amber crystal light, she admired the bandage taped to her arm, tinged with impatience.

“How long until it starts working?” asked Yaz.

“Dunno,” said the Doctor. “I thought it would go straight away, but maybe it’s the healing process.” She pressed her lips to one side in slight disappointment. “Give it time, psychic stuff can be a little shy,” she said, more to herself than Yaz. With her free hand, she swept her hair aside before starting to set coordinates for Sheffield. “Thanks for coming with me, Yaz. Good moral support.”

The back of Yaz’s neck prickled as she remembered the Doctor squeezing her hand while Serafin applied the ink. She looked up in time to see the Doctor’s hair falling back into place over—

“Hey, hold still.” Yaz sidled closer and, overly aware of what she was doing, moved blonde hair off to the side again. Up close, Yaz could see the fine hairs that grew on the nape of the Doctor’s neck, and she did her best not to breathe, resisting the urge to nuzzle into them. The Doctor smelled like Earl Grey tea today. “I thought I saw…” She pushed more hair aside, the darker layers of brown beneath the blonde showing, until she saw, right at the Doctor’s hairline, a small black question mark. “Did you always have a question mark on the back of your neck?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve _always_ had _any_ part of this—“

“Doctor.”

“Not that I noticed, no.” The Doctor’s eyes snapped to Yaz’s, bright and intense, a grin starting to spread across her face. “You don’t think?” She spun in place like a dog chasing its tail, trying to see.

“No, wait, hold still,” said Yaz again, pulling out her phone for a picture. And again, she swept aside the Doctor’s hair, but the mark was gone. “But it was just there,” said Yaz, frowning.

It would be another few weeks (months? It was hard to keep track) before the Doctor actually saw her own tattoo, swirling around on her forearm. The bandage was long gone, and the raw red circle had faded into paper-thin scabs, and then, just a slightly raised scar. Dutifully, as it healed, the Doctor had kept the wound clean and moisturized it, ruefully thinking of Lady Cassandra every time, and she had gotten absolutely no glimpses of any artwork. She was starting to wonder if psychic ink tattoos were only visible to everyone else, just something she’d have but not know about for the rest of at least this lifetime.

She thought of Van Gogh, taking him and Amy to the museum, and how Vincent had never known his own successes until they were pointed out in that quick trip to well beyond his time; the memory of Amy’s disappointment that Vincent hadn’t gotten to paint more works, and the inscription to her on the _Sunflowers_ , swelled in her chest. The Doctor smiled softly to herself and rolled up her sleeves; Yaz would be expecting a pickup soon.

Just as she flipped an hourglass, she saw it and gasped: as though Vincent van Gogh himself had applied his brushes to her arm, a fragment of what looked like the sky in _The Starry Night_ burst from a sunflower blooming on her fore. As if in mirror, the excitement blossomed across her face, mouth open.

“Oh, I love it!” she cried, the TARDIS trilling around her. “Just like his!” She addressed her ship, “Is it plagiarism if the tattoo decided what to look like?” The TARDIS made a noncommittal burble. “No matter, it’s _brilliant.”_ She admired it for a moment longer. “Thanks, mate,” said the Doctor, imagining her words across time to Vincent.

Yaz would notice the Doctor’s tattoo shift and split and reorient itself nearly every time the Doctor herself experienced something new. Frenetic and frenzied as only the Doctor’s thoughts could be, the tattoo changed like the weather. Yaz sometimes spotted the concentric circles of what she learned was Old High Gallifreyan spinning along the Doctor’s clavicle. Sometimes, it would be a miniaturized portrait of the Citadel of Gallifrey on the Doctor’s calf, when Yaz noticed the Doctor brooding to herself in a corner of the control room. Once, when they had lost the TARDIS on a remote junk planet, the tattoo fashioned itself into a scaled image of the blue box on her chest, lantern peeking out from the edge of her shirt, and Yaz knew the Doctor desperately missed her ship. Other times, it would look like an Escher drawing: stairs leading to nowhere and shapes folding back on themselves, unfathomable and impossible as the Doctor herself. Yaz could stare at those iterations forever, but only ever caught glimpses here and there, as the Doctor was usually covered from head to toe, all long sleeves and sweeping coat.

Yaz wondered if the Doctor realized that her thoughts were never all the way private anymore; the tattoo would take on abstract shapes that suggested her mood or a specific image that had stuck in her mind.

“What does it look like to you?” she’d ask. Yaz had gotten into the habit of swapping perspectives with the Doctor. There were some days they’d see the same thing, often an imprint of a Van Gogh fragment or something they’d spotted on a previous adventure together, like a rare species of flower. Other times, Yaz could see landscapes of home, but the Doctor would see the night sky above Nyx. Yaz would ask what the circles branching out from her collar under her shirt to her shoulder read, and if she could see them herself, the Doctor would translate a whole story of an adventure in a past life.

And there were times when the Doctor would darken, facing down a Dalek or telling off a Cyberman, and the tattoo would roil under her skin, showing explosions, black holes, a supernova, flowing onto her hands and creeping up her neck, until it looked like all of the Doctor’s skin was consumed in flame and she all but glowed with radioactive fury.

After the revelation of the Timeless Child, the Doctor’s tattoo vanished again, and didn’t reappear for months.

There came a day when Yaz looked up from her tea to the Doctor watching her with a soft, thoughtful expression, and Yaz almost inhaled her drink.

“What?”

The Doctor seemed to waver between slight anxiety and adoration. “Just you, Yasmin Khan.”

“What about me?” Yaz asked, knowing full well that the Doctor only used her full name when she was impressed or trying to make a point. The Doctor crossed the room and sat beside her on the stair. Carefully, she took Yaz’s tea from her hands and set the mug on the floor.

“Of all the possibilities, all the happenings and things that had to fall into place for you to exist,” said the Doctor, and Yaz forgot to breathe. “The universe truly made an awesome human.”

“I thought you said that was my mum,” said Yaz faintly, looking into the Doctor’s eyes, a fathomless depth of hazel that reflected all the stars she’d ever seen.

“Najia, too,” the Doctor admitted. The silence that fell between them was a comfortable amount of awkward; they had traveled together long enough that silence was _okay_ , though the Doctor usually made some noise or other, tinkering or talking. Yaz became aware of their proximity, anchored to the Doctor’s eyes, and she felt the Doctor take her hand. The Doctor’s palms were soft, but her fingers were calloused in a way that recounted the endless maintenance routines and additions to the TARDIS. Her tattoo wouldn’t stay still: it swirled and spiraled like a koi fish in an undersized pond, just a little grey blob circling her hand and wrist. When they touched, it exploded into color, spinning and splashing faster.

Yaz swallowed. She felt the nagging sense that she should say something, anything, though she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. The Doctor, too, looked as though she were on the edge of saying or doing something herself, her gaze flicking between Yaz’s eyes and her mouth. And instead of waiting for whatever it was the Doctor was trying or going to say, Yaz did the first thing that came to mind: she closed the already shortening gap between them.

The Doctor kissed her back, and neither of them noticed the tattoo spreading blissful rainbows up her arm.

Yaz would wake to the Doctor’s bare back in the night; the tattoo spread across her shoulders, a window into her dreams. Sometimes, it would show planets Yaz had never seen before, Gallifrey at the height of its civilization, or crashing oceans and rolling storm clouds. Others nights, the Doctor would shake and cry out, the Master or an army of Daleks appearing in her skin. And sometimes Yaz would see faces she didn’t know: a young blonde woman in a blue jacket, a thin black woman, a no-nonsense ginger woman in a library, a vivacious woman with springing gold curls and her own sonic screwdriver.

Yaz would wake in the morning and the Doctor would be making breakfast or tea, or setting the TARDIS controls for their next destination, and the tattoo would have settled into the night sky or another Van Gogh or Escher lookalike, by now the most common appearances, as though nothing had happened while the Doctor was asleep. And Yaz would hug her from behind, watching the tattoo choose its next form, warping and reaffixing itself to the Doctor's chest, the nape of her neck, her arms. Her favorite would be when they could fall asleep together, Yaz tracing the newly set lines and shapes, all of which she could see before they turned out the light.

The Doctor staggered into the TARDIS, the tails of her coat smoking, her face scratched and bruised. She cradled one broken arm against her body. Pausing to lean against one crystal pillar, then the next, she slowly, painfully limped to the center of the control room. Frantically, she began pressing buttons on the console with her good hand. She could feel the surges of energy bubbling in her body, her fingertips already starting to spark with gold.

“No, not now,” she moaned, flipping switches faster. “Yaz will kill me again if I can’t say goodbye.” She pulled the lever and the TARDIS dematerialized, wheezing in a desperate version of its normal rushing sound as it struggled to speed its flight. “Come on,” she urged, sinking to the floor. There was internal damage; she could tell by the way one of her livers felt somehow broken off at one end, a sharp pain in her stomach. The TARDIS whined. “I know, I know, just get us to Yaz before I blow both our faces off.”

Prompted by the familiar thud of landing, the Doctor heaved herself up from the floor by the console, and fell again to her knees. Bloody Zygons, bloody Daleks, bloody Cybermen and all their _bloody_ crossfire as they fought over who’d get to reign supreme over Earth ten centuries down when they made it there, fighting ship to ship. She’d commandeered one, only for it to be shot out of space somewhere above an orphan planet, the flaming wreckage hurtling to the ground. What symmetry of her entry and exit of this body, she thought, grimacing as she crawled toward the door. No trace regenerative energy to save her from a crash from orbit this time, just pure regeneration.

She collapsed feet from the door, reaching for it. “ _No,_ ” she said, clawing at the air, unable to pull herself further. “I didn’t get to…” A tear spilled from the corner of her eye. She was so tired, and she could feel systems in her body shutting down, preparing for reboot, a hard reset. It was a shame she liked this face so much, and she had gotten fond of this gallbladder. One of her hearts stuttered, the other quickening its pace to make up for its twin.

“Oh, give it a rest,” she muttered at them, groaning as she rolled onto her back. The TARDIS keened. “I know, I liked this one, too. I was brilliant like this,” said the Doctor. The TARDIS gave a soft chirp. “My beautiful ghost monument. We’ll still be together,” she assured her, eyelids so heavy, lungs starting to slow. Still, she managed the smallest smile for her ship. “We’re fam...”

The tattoo finally came back to rest on its entry point, the pale circle on the Doctor’s wrist. In the fading sense that was blooming around her, the Doctor thought of Yaz, Yasmin Khan, her unwavering, boundless curiosity and kindness; the gentle, marveling way she’d trace the circles that had appeared in her skin. Out of the corner of her eye, she could make out three letters on her wrist in Gallifreyan before they vanished in a burst of gold flame.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I'm SORRY, I'm a monster, it started very cute then got VERY SAD.
> 
> Be kind to yourselves and others.
> 
> Cheers,  
> Jo


End file.
